NACA's Metamorphosis Begins

The explanation for Wood's action and for
the general prudence of NACA in dealing with the Air Force on space matters in
the spring of 1958 lay in the contents of the space bill sent by the Eisenhower
administration to Capitol Hill on April 14 and then being debated in Congress.
This proposal appeared likely to transform NACA into the focal point of the
nation's efforts in space.

From the initial discussions in 1954 of a United States International
Geophysical Year satellite project, President Eisenhower's position had been
that space activities should be conducted solely for peaceful purposes. The
nature and objectives of Project Vanguard had reflected this policy. He summed
up his feelings in a letter to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, dated January
12, 1958. Describing the demilitarization of space as "the most important
problem which faces the world today," he proposed that -

. . . outer space should be used only for peaceful purposes. . . .
can we not stop the production of such weapons which would use or, more
accurately, misuse, outer space, now for the first time opening up as a field
for man's exploration? Should not outer space be dedicated to the peaceful
uses of mankind and denied to the purposes of war? . . .27

Consistent with this "space for peace" policy, the concentration on February
7, 1958, of Federal space activities in the Advanced Research Projects Agency of
the Defense Department had been only an interim measure pending establishment of
a new, civilian-controlled space management organization. Shortly before the
creation of ARPA, Eisenhower had turned to his newly appointed, 18-member
President's Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), chaired by President James R.
Killian, Jr., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and including among
its members NACA Chairman Doolittle. Eisenhower instructed the Committee to draw
up two documents: a broad policy statement familiarizing Americans with space
and justifying Government-financed astronautical ventures, and a recommendation
for organizing a national program in space science. The "Killian committee," as
the early PSAC was called, chose two subcommittees. One, on policy, was headed
by Edward H. Purcell, a physicist and executive vice-president of Bell Telephone
Laboratories; the other, on organization, was led by Harvard University
physicist James B. Fisk.

The Fisk subcommittee on organization finished its work first. After talking
with Doolittle and NACA Director Dryden, Fisk and his colleagues made a crucial
report to PSAC late in February. A new agency built around NACA should be
created to carry out a comprehensive national program in astronautics,
emphasizing peaceful, civilian-controlled research and development. The White
House Advisory Committee on Government Organization, consisting of Nelson B.
Rockefeller, [83] Killian, and Maurice H. Stans, Director of the Bureau of the
Budget, used this PSAC subcommittee report as the basis for a formal
recommendation on a national space organization, which Eisenhower received and
approved on March 5. Five months after Sputnik I, the administration began
drawing up proposed legislation for consideration by the Congress. As Dryden
later observed, NACA's cautious post-Sputnik strategy had "paid off, in the long
run."

PSAC's rationale for space exploration, entitled "Introduction to Outer
Space," was issued on March 26. This statement proclaimed that "the compelling
urge of man to explore and to discover," "the defense objective," "national
prestige," and "new opportunities for scientific observation and experiment"
were "four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the
advancement of space technology."28

On April 2, Eisenhower sent his formal message on space matters to Congress.
The document again indicated the President's intense conviction that space
should be primarily reserved for scientific exploration, not military
exploitation. It called for the establishment of a "National Aeronautical and
Space Agency," which would absorb NACA and assume responsibility for all "space
activities . . . except . . . those projects primarily associated with military
requirements." The executive authority in the new organization would be
exercised by one person, a director, who would be advised by a 17-member
"National Aeronautical and Space Board." The proposal for a loose advisory board
represented little more than an extension of the NACA Main Committee. The idea
for a single executive, however, stemmed mainly from the opinions of
Eisenhower's legislative experts and the officials of the Bureau of the Budget.
They wanted authority in the new agency to be centralized, not diffused in a
committee as was the case with NACA and the Atomic Energy Commission. The second
and more critical departure from NACA history was Eisenhower's stipulation that
the proposed organization would have not only research but development,
managerial, and flight operational responsibilities. Unlike NACA, then, it would
possess extensive authority for contracting research and development projects.29

Twelve days later, on April 14, the Eisenhower administration sent to the
Democratic-controlled Congress its bill to create such an agency, drafted
largely by the Bureau of the Budget.30
In the House of Representatives and the Senate, special committees began
hearings on the bill. The measure would undergo extensive amendment and
reworking at the hands of the legislators. But it soon was apparent that a new
agency would come into being, that NACA would constitute its nucleus, and that
it would undertake large-scale development and operational activities in
addition to research. The odds were better than good that a manned satellite
project would fall within the domain of the civilian organization.

Proceeding on this assumption, engineers working at all of the NACA
installations - at the ranges and wind tunnels at Langley and Ames, in the
high-temperature jet facilities and rocket-test chambers at Lewis and Langley,
at the [84] rocket launch pads and control panels on Wallops Island, and in the
flight hangars at the High Speed Flight Station - stepped up their research in
materials, aerodynamics, and control.31
By early 1958, according to Preston R. Bassett, chairman of NACA's renamed
Committee on Aircraft, Missile, and Spacecraft Aerodynamics, approximately 55
percent of all NACA activity was already applicable to space flight.32
According to another set of NACA statistics, the Pilotless Aircraft Research
Division (PARD) was expending 90 percent of its effort on space and missile
research; the rest of the Langley laboratory, 40 percent; Ames, 29 percent; and
Lewis, 36 percent.33
Virtually every member of NACA's technical staff eagerly anticipated a national
program of space exploration. Since the raison d'Ítre of NACA always had been to
improve the performance of piloted aircraft, most NACA engineers viewed manned
space flight as an even more challenging and rewarding form of activity.

[85] Not everyone in the NACA laboratories, however, was convinced that the
agency's destiny lay in developing hardware, managing programs, and carrying out
satellite launchings. Many scientist-engineers subscribed wholeheartedly to the
official NACA position enunciated by Headquarters in January and February: While
NACA ought to labor mightily in the furtherance of space science, it should
continue to solve problems posed by other agencies engaged in development and
operations, not handle programs itself. The "research-minded" element within the
NACA technical staff probably was strongest at Ames. Most of the Ames complement
had gone to work for NACA because of the nature of the organization. Its
quasi-academic focus on research, its receptiveness to new and sometimes radical
concepts, its relative obscurity and freedom from politics appealed to them. At
the California institution the prospect of managing programs, which entailed
fighting for appropriations, wrangling with industrial contractors, and perhaps
competing with the military, seemed exceedingly distasteful.34

This attitude was not so prevalent at the two other laboratories or at the
High Speed Flight Station. The years of direct participation with Air Force,
Navy, and contract personnel in the research aircraft projects had given Walter
Williams and his staff at the Flight Station a rather clear operational
orientation, albeit with airplanes and not with space rockets and satellites.
The Lewis and Langley staffs included a sizable number of research workers who,
while enjoying the intellectual liberty of NACA, felt it would be quite a
challenge to carry out a program of their own instead of simply providing advice
for the military and industry. They looked on approvingly as the Eisenhower
administration sent to Congress a measure substantially embodying their ideas.

The academic approach to aeronautics and astronautics pervaded much of
Langley, the oldest and in some ways the most tradition-minded of the NACA
laboratories. The commitment to basic research and the devotion to theoretical
calculations and wind tunnels as the most efficacious means of gathering
aerodynamic data were as strong among some Langley engineers as among the Ames
investigators. But in the Flight Research, Instrument Research, and Pilotless
Aircraft Research Divisions at Langley; at the semiautonomous Pilotless Aircraft
Research Station on Wallops Island, 70 miles away across Chesapeake Bay; and in
the Flight Research Division at Lewis, there were people who had gained the bulk
of their experience by working with airfoils mounted on the wings of airplanes
in flight and from air-launched and ground-launched scale models propelled by
rockets. For years they had been close to "development" and "operations" in
their research activities, but they had turned their telemetered findings over
to someone else for practical application. Now it seemed that the Soviet
artificial moons might have given these ambitious aeronautical engineers a
chance to put their imagination and technical experience to use in a manned
space flight program. As Paul E. Purser, then head of the High Temperature
Branch of PARD, put it, "In early 1958 we simply assumed we would get the manned
satellite project. So we started to work."35

[86] Over the years the PARD specialists had perfected their techniques of
launch, guidance, automatic control, and telemetry on small rockets, and had
steadily added to the mountain of experimental data on hypervelocity performance
and aerodynamic heating. Their rockets, while remaining small in thrust and
payload, had become more and more sophisticated. During 1957, by firing
five-stage research rockets, they had been able to achieve a final-stage
velocity of mach 16.36
And they already were doing conceptual work on a new and larger multistage
research rocket, designed to boost scale models in their own stability and
heat-transfer studies and to send up small instrumented satellites and space
probes for the Air Force. Later called the Scout, this four- or five-stage,
solid-propellant configuration could fire its stages sequentially to place
either a 150-pound payload in a 300-mile orbit, 100 pounds in a
5,000-to-10,000-mile orbit, or 30 pounds in an orbit more than 22,000 miles from
Earth.`37

In the hectic weeks and months following the Soviet satellite launchings, the
advocates of manned space flight at Langley, realizing that their experience in
nose-cone research was directly transferable to the design of manned satellite
vehicles, turned their attention to spacecraft design as never before. NACA's
initial agreement of March 14, 1958, to collaborate with the Air Force in
drawing up plans for a manned orbital project gave official sanction to research
they already had been doing largely on their own time. Theoretically this work
still was in support of the Air Force and industrial manned-satellite studies.
As it turned out, the Langley engineers were doing the early development work
for their own enterprise, later to become Project Mercury.

The sparkplug behind much of this activity was Maxime A. Faget, head of the
Performance Aerodynamics Branch in PARD. Thirty-seven years old in 1958, Faget
had been born in British Honduras, the son of an honored physician in the United
States Public Health Service. In 1943, when his father was developing sulfone
drugs for the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, the diminutive Faget
received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana
State University. After his discharge from the Navy's submarine service in 1946,
he joined the staff at Langley. He soon devised choking inlets for ramjets, a
flight mach number meter, and several mathematical formulas for deriving data
from Richard T. Whitcomb's area rule.38
Like Robert R. Gilruth and others before him at Langley, Faget preferred to
enlarge his knowledge in aerodynamics and thermodynamics not in wind tunnels but
by observing and telemetering data from vehicles in free flight.

In mid-March, less than a week after the conclusion of the Air Force
man-in-space working conference in Los Angeles, Gilruth, as Assistant Director
of Langley, called Faget and his other top engineers together to determine what
should be the "Langley position" on optimum spacecraft configurations at the
NACA Conference on High-Speed Aerodynamics, to be held at the Ames laboratory
beginning March 18. The consensus of the meeting was that the Langley-PARD
representatives should present a united front at Ames behind a ballistic
concept.39

[87] The Conference on High-Speed Aerodynamics, the last in a long line of
full-dress symposiums held by NACA, attracted most of the luminaries in the
organization, including Dryden, Silverstein, Eggers, H. Julian Allen, Walter
Williams, and the members of the Committee on Aircraft, Missile, and Spacecraft
Aerodynamics. Military personnel and representatives of most of the aircraft and
missile firms also attended this forum. The 46 papers read at the conference,
dealing with hypersonic, satellite, and interplanetary flight, represented the
most advanced thinking in aerodynamics within NACA. Taken together, the papers
demonstrated how far some NACA engineers trained in aeronautics had pushed their
research into the new discipline of astronautics.40

Much interest centered around three presentations proposing alternative
configurations for manned orbital flight. The first of these papers was authored
by Faget, Benjamine J. Garland, and James J. Buglia. Faget presented it as the
orbital configuration regarded most favorably by PARD personnel - the wingless,
nonlifting vehicle. Faget and his associates pointed out several advantages of
this simple ballistic approach. In the first place, ballistic missile research,
development, and production experience was directly applicable to the design and
construction of such a vehicle. The fact that it would be fired along a
ballistic path meant that automatic stabilization, guidance, and control
equipment could be kept at a minimum, thus saving weight and diminishing the
likelihood of a malfunction.

The nonlifting vehicle simplified return from orbit because the only
necessary maneuver was the firing of retrograde rockets - "retrorockets" - to
decelerate the spacecraft, deflecting it from orbit and subjecting it to
atmospheric drag. And even that maneuver need not be too precise for the
accomplishment of a safe recovery. After retrofire, successful entry depended
solely on the inherent stability and structural soundness of the ballistic
vehicle. Faget, Garland, and Buglia acknowledged that the pure-drag device
necessitated landing in a large and imprecisely defined area, using a parachute,
and dispensing with lifting and braking controls to correct the rate of descent,
the direction, or the impact force. Rather severe oscillations might occur
during descent. But Faget and his associates noted that tests with
model ballistic capsules in the 20-foot-diameter, free-spinning tunnel at Langley
had shown that attitude control jets, such as those used on the X-1B, X-2, and
X-15 rocketplanes, could provide rate damping and help correct the oscillations,
while a small drogue parachute should give still more stability.

The three Langley engineers went so far as to propose a specific, if
rudimentary, ballistic configuration - a nearly flat-faced cone angled about 15
degrees from the vertical, 11 feet long and 7 feet in diameter, using a heat
sink rather than an ablative covering for thermal protection. Although the space
passenger would lie supine against the heatshield at all times, during orbital
flight the capsule would reverse its attitude so that the deceleration loads of
reentry would be imposed from front to back through the man's body, the same as
under [89] acceleration. The authors concluded that "as far as reentry and
recovery is concerned [sic], the state-of-the-art is sufficiently advanced so
that it is possible to proceed confidently with a manned satellite project based
upon the ballistic reentry type of vehicle."41

One dissenter from the Langley consensus favoring a manned projectile was
John Becker, of the Langley Compressibility Research Division and a veteran of
X-15 development, who read a paper at the conference on possible winged
satellite configurations. Becker's main concern was the reentry heating problem
in conjunction with some maneuverability within the atmosphere. Combining his
theoretical findings with those of Charles W. Mathews of Langley, Becker
suggested a glider-like configuration. Instead of entering the atmosphere at a
low angle of attack and using lift to return to Earth, it would deliberately
come in at a high angle of attack, employing its lower wing surface as a
heatshield. Deceleration loads still could be held at a little over 1 g in this
fashion. The gross weight of such a low-lift, high-drag vehicle would be only
about 3,060 pounds. "Thus . . . the minimum winged satellite vehicle is not
prohibitively heavier than the drag type," concluded Becker. "The weight is
sufficiently low to permit launching by booster systems similar to that for the
drag vehicle described in a previous paper by Maxime A. Faget, Benjamine J.
Garland, and James J. Buglia."42

What some Langley researchers had come to regard as the "Ames position" on
manned satellites was described in a paper by Thomas J. Wong, Charles A.
Hermach, John O. Reller, and Bruce E. Tinling, four aeronautical engineers who
had worked with Eggers. They presented a polished, more detailed version of the
blunt, semilifting M-1 configuration conceived by Eggers the previous summer.
For such a vehicle a lift/drag ratio of 1/2 could be effected simply by removing
the upper portion of a pure ballistic shape, making the body somewhat deeper
than that of a half-cone, and adding trailing edge flaps for longitudinal and
lateral control. Maximum deceleration forces would be only 2 g, low enough to
permit a pilot to remain in control of his vehicle. Blunting would reduce heat
conduction; the vehicle would be stable and controllable down to subsonic speeds
and would provide substantial maneuverability; and structural weight would
remain relatively low. Thus "it appears that a high-lift, high-drag configuration
of the type discussed has attractive possibilities for the reentry of a
satellite vehicle."43

The Ames engineers' presentation was not in the form of a spacecraft design
challenge to the Langley-PARD aerodynamicists. Eggers and various others at Ames
remained convinced of the overall superiority of the lifting body for manned
satellite missions. But as Eggers explained, "Ames was not enthusiastic in 1958
to participate in an operational program for building and launching spacecraft
of any kind, manned or unmanned."44
While some Ames people were rather avidly pushing the M-1 concept, their avidity
did not stem from any desire for operational dominance in a civilian space
program. [90] The California NACA scientists were quite willing to leave the
business of building prototypes, carrying out full-scale tests, and then
managing a program to their more "hardware-oriented" colleagues across the
continent.

To Faget, Purser, and Gilruth the choice between the semilifting
configuration favored by the Ames group and their nonlifting device really was
an academic one. Given the assumption that a manned satellite should be fired
into orbit as quickly as possible, then the Atlas ICBM, not the still untested
Titan or a Thor-fluorine combination, should serve as the launch vehicle for a
one-ton spacecraft. The Atlas was following a tortuous route toward status as a
reliable operational rocket, but it was still the only ICBM anywhere near being
ready. The criterion already adopted by Faget and his associates, that an
attempt to orbit a man should follow the simplest, quickest, and most dependable
approach, negated a heavier, semilifting vehicle; this would have required
adding an extra stage to the Atlas or some other rocket. The same criterion even
ruled out Becker's low-lift, high-drag proposal. If the first manned orbital
project was to adhere to and profit from ballistic missile experience, then the
capabilities of the Atlas should be the first consideration. Faget himself did
not have detailed data on the Atlas' design performance before, during, or for
some time after the Ames conference; such information was highly classified and
he lacked an official "need to know." About two months after he delivered his
paper he learned through conversations with Frank J. Dore, an engineer-executive
of Convair, what he needed to design a manned ballistic payload.45
In the weeks following the Ames conference, Faget's and other Langley-PARD
research teams, centering their efforts on the basic ballistic shape, started
working out the details of hurling a man-carrying projectile around the world.46

While the engineers at the NACA Virginia installations hurried their designs,
tests, and plans, and while Congress received Eisenhower's space bill, the
organizational transformation of NACA began. After the White House Advisory
Committee on Government Organization recommended that a national civilian space
program be built around NACA, Director Dryden and his subordinates in Washington
began planning the revamping that would have to accompany the reorientation of
NACA functions. Dryden called Abe Silverstein of Lewis to Washington to begin
organizing a spaceflight development program. On April 2, as part of his space
message to Congress, Eisenhower instructed NACA and the Defense Department to
review the projects then under ARPA to determine which should be transferred to
the new civilian space agency. NACA and Defense Department representatives, in
consultation with Bureau of the Budget officials, reached tentative agreements
on the disposition of practically all the projects and facilities in question,
with the notable exception of manned space flight. In accordance with
Eisenhower's directive that NACA "describe the internal organization, management
structure, staff, facilities, and funds which will be required," NACA set up an
ad hoc committee on organization under the chairmanship of Assistant Director
Ira Abbott.47

28 President's Scientific Advisory Committee,
Introduction to Outer Space, in Senate Special Committee on Space and
Astronautics, 85 Cong., 2 sess. (1958), Compilation of Materials on Outer
Space, No. 1, 45-46. The foregoing account of the work of PSAC in the late
winter of 1958 is taken mainly from interviews with Dryden, Wood, and Dembling,
Washington, Aug. 31, Sept. 1 and 2, 1965; and memo, Dryden for Eugene M. Emme
for NASA Historical Files, "The NACA-NASA Transition, October 1957 to October
1958," Sept. 8, 1965.

30 The administration bill is reprinted,
among other places, in Astronautics and Space Exploration, 11-15. The
legislative history of the bill is discussed in detail in Alison E. Griffith,
The National Aeronautics and Space Act: A Study of Public Policy
(Washington, 1962).

31 Indicative of the widespread and growing
concern at Langley over the prospect of space flight was a special course in
basic space technology, given by members of the Flight Research Division from
Feb. to May 1958. The lectures covered such subjects as lunar orbits, rocket
operation, aerodynamic heating of spacecraft, and the medical problems of space
flight. See "Notes on Space Technology Compiled by the Flight Research
Division," Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Feb.-May 1958. One of the members of
the Flight Research Division at the time has referred to these collected
lectures as "essentially the first U.S. textbook in space flight technology."
John P. Mayer, comments, Sept. 8, 1965.

32 This estimate was broken down into 30
percent space research in aerodynamics, 20 percent in propulsion, and 5 percent
in structures. Minutes, NACA Committee on Aerodynamics, Moffett Field, Calif.,
March 21, 1958, 6.

33 "National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, Organization and Distribution of Effort Related to Space Research
for the Fiscal Year 1958," chart in Astronautics and Space Exploration,
404-405.

34 These generalizations are based on
conversations with various senior members of the technical staff at what is now
the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., April 22-23, 1964. During
this visit mottoes such as "NACA Forever" and "NASA Go Home" were observed
posted around the laboratories.